Dedication to Polls and Voters: Notated Music Since 1890 - Voting and Discussion Thread

Threw together an unranked ballot & voted, 1 vote per composer with a few notable exceptions, did v. little listening beforehand, sorry.

Also listening to Ginastera cello concerto now, and yeah this is awesome! Almost spectral

Basically he started out folk-modernist and got more avant-gardist as he got older

besides the ones I mentioned also do not miss Cantata Para America Magica (why didn't I nominate that???)

Sund4r -- I voted! My first 50 are ranked, second 50 are unranked. I had to kind of go into a frenzy to make these decisions...

You can do a mixed ballot so that some are ranked and some are unranked. Select "mixed" and leave a black space between the ranked and unranked portions.

― Hi! I'm twice-coloured! (Sund4r), Friday, 16 September 2016 14:24 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Black space = blank space, I assumed

D.C. al Voted

After the first cut, I have 194 pieces left.

Also, how did we forget the first two Penderecki string quartets??

And I finally cast my own ballot.

Did we really nominate that many Sibelius pieces and not "Finlandia"? I might not have voted for it anyway but it is a striking omission. I had a request to write that one in, which is totally fine. (Will accept any write-in votes, as long as seandalai is OK with it.)

Finlandia is not terrible but it would be like my 8th favorite Sibelius tone poem

yeah, that's the kind of Sibelius that made me think I didn't like Sibelius for a long time

Ha, I don't actually like the piece, to be clear.:P I still wouldn't call myself a fan but, for sure, e.g. Tapiola did lead me to re-evaluate him.

sund4r pls listen to the pcs nominated in this poll! Plus pohjola's daughter which was a glaring oversight

Forgot about this for months and didn't do any new listening, but I just put together a ballot of favorites.

I was the write-in for Finlandia

I decided in the last 12 hours to throw together a slapdash ballot for this. I'm going to be up for a few more hours sampling stuff I've heard before to make a 60 piece ballot. So far I've rediscovered stuff I've owned for years and realized how much I love it (Adams' Fast Ride, Messaien's Quartet pour la fin du temps), so this poll is working out for me even without the rollout.

xpost to Sund4r from July, Adams is pretty great, Nixon In China is way way better than Shaker Loops which honestly doesn't impress me that much anymore. Did you listen to Short Ride in a Fast Machine? It's fantastic. It's like taking amphetamines and seeing an opera.

I'm learning I have a hard time with 20th century vocal music. El Cimmaron, Berio's Sinfonia, etc

I had a ton of Reich on my shortlist but then most of it didn't stand up to the competition. I actually cut like four pieces of his, and that was one of the composers I held really highly before auditioning my picks.

Voted, off to bed, wake me when the rollout starts

Sent an unranked ballot, mostly filled with choral works I've performed. Can't wait for the countdown to check out everything on it!

Iirc, I listened to all of the Adams pieces on the list. I'd definitely listened to some before. I think "Short Ride" was one of the ones I liked better but none of them made my ballot. I should have probably put Nixon on there.

James Redd: there is a decent amount of big band and American songbook stuff on the noms list, if you're up for taking a look. I nominated at least one bossa nova tune.

I'm intrigued to see how this turns out. My sense is that (except for me, ha) some of the posters who might have gone for the really pointy-headed stuff are sitting this one out. Predictions for #1? Stravinsky?

James Redd: there is a decent amount of big band and American songbook stuff on the noms list, if you're up for taking a look. I nominated at least one bossa nova tune.

Admittedly, it would have been more helpful if I told you this a week ago, when you commented.

4'33"
xp

Re Adams, I like Naive and Sentimental Music a lot

I might have voted for Phrygian Gates actually. Listening to it right now. Just listened again to "Short Ride"; didn't click with it. I did vote for both John Luther Adams pieces.

Oh, fuck, I nominated from the wrong list... Do you want me to redo it Sund4r?

On Adams, I voted for Nixon. I'm not sure he has that perfect piece, but this album is a great collection. The Chairman Dances going into Christian Zeal and Activity.

What list did you C&P from? I'm a little confused. I think it would be easiest for seandalai to tabulate the results if everyone is working from the same list, if it's not too much trouble.

From the link in the nominations page. An excel sheet. So there's no '-'s, but it should be the same text.

How many ballots do you have?

Frederik, I think that's probably fine. I'm double-checking. CS: dunno yet.

apologies for not voting in the end - i've had a very trying 3 months and i can't cobble together anything that would feel fair for this, haven't explored enough of the stuff i don't know.

will enjoy watching tho.

From the link in the nominations page. An excel sheet. So there's no '-'s, but it should be the same text.

Confirmed that this is not a problem.

Yay, thanks!

For some reason I assumed Gorecki's 3rd would make top 10. That's a popular one, right?

I don't really think you're going to see much consensus tbh.

Oh, that's an interesting one: Gorecki's 3rd is super-popular with the general public but I don't think it is really a piece that is held in extremely high esteem by specialists/scholars. I don't think it's considered a bad piece, just not an essential piece of the canon. (It made the bottom half of my ballot.) Not something that I ever see e.g. included in 20th century music history courses, except maybe as a side note concerning its runaway commercial success.

I agree that consensus is unlikely!

(Looking forward to Jon or someone proving me wrong about Gorecki! What does Alex Ross think of it? Seems like something he might like.)

sund4r I hope you will be providing a spotify playlist with results.

Uh, I can still vote, right?

After I examine the nominations, ofc

Yes! There are still 5h12m but I'm willing to extend the deadline if there are people who still want to vote.

There are some real classical heads on this board. Would love to see ballots from you.

I think the Third Symphony might do quite well. It's one of those perfect classical records, where the production, the sound, the interpretation, just hits the spot. Like with Tabula Rasa or The Sinking of the Titanic. But those two have the misfortune to be several unrelated pieces put together. The Third Symphony is just the Third Symphony, it's much easier to vote for.

Ross on the Third: There is no doubt of the symphony’s nobility and weight, yet it has always left me a little cold. The arcs of emotion feel too precisely calibrated: each listener seems primed to experience the same epiphanies at the same moments.

From here: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/cult-fame-discontents

I know the Elektra recording of Górecki's Third was super popular for some reason, this is what Wikipedia says:

A 1991 recording with the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Zinman and featuring the soloist Dawn Upshaw, was released in 1992 by the Elektra imprint Nonesuch Records. Within two years, the recording had sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide; the recording climbed to number 6 on the mainstream UK album charts, and while it did not appear on the US Billboard 200, it stayed at the top of the US classical charts for 38 weeks and stayed on for 138 weeks. The Zinman/Upshaw recording has sold over a million copies. It probably counts as the best selling contemporary classical record of all time.

The writer Michael Steinberg described the symphony's success as essentially a phenomenon of the compact disc, and while live performances are still given, they do not always sell out. Some critics, wondering at the sudden success of the piece nearly two decades after its composition, suggest that it resonated with a particular mood in the popular culture at the time. Stephen Johnson, writing in A guide to the symphony, wondered whether the commercial success of the work was "a flash in the pan" or would turn out to have lasting significance. In 1998, the critic Michael Steinberg asked, "[are people] really listening to this symphony? How many CD buyers discover that fifty-four minutes of very slow music with a little singing in a language they don't understand is more than they want? Is it being played as background music to Chardonnay and brie?" Steinberg compared the success of Górecki's symphony to the Doctor Zhivago phenomenon of 1958: "Everybody rushed to buy the book; few managed actually to read it. The appearance of the movie in 1965 rescued us all from the necessity."Górecki was as surprised as anyone else at the recording's success, and later speculated that "perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed."

I have that record and it's pretty good, and like sund4r I did put the piece in the lower half of my ballot, but I wonder why this piece in particular has become the most popular piece of contemporary classical (not counting movie scores)? Obviously it's nice to the ears and not "difficult" in the way a lot of contemporary compositions are, but Górecki is hardly the only example of that.

For example, you'd think Max Richter would've become super popular based on those same qualities (nice to the ears, traditionalist compositions that are still stark and modern enough not to sound corny to dilettantes), but I don't think he has?

I think the back-story probably helps Gorecki's signifiance there

I don't have the link for the ballots yet so feel free to keep voting.

Yeah, the back-story definitely helps.

This is completely coincidental, but we're talking Polish composers, and I went to a pressscreening for a rerelease of Kieslowski's Blue today, which is sort of a Polish film about composers that was a big succes the same years Gorecki sold millions. But the music in Blue is so weird, so kitchily romantic, completely without the sorrow of Gorecki or the horror of Penderecki, not to say the willful avantgardeness of what actually were the 'biggest' composers in France at that time - Boulez and other Darmstadt composers. It's such a weird idea of contemporary 'mitteleuropa' music.

Unaccountably missed this up until now so I'm pleased voting is still open, but I don't understand the google form. What is the difference between weighted, unweighted and mixed ballots, and how will that affect the way the ballots are counted? If I have say 20 pieces that I want to vote for in an order of preference, should I paste them in descending order and mark it "weighted"?